Redundant Array of Independent Disk (RAID) adapters have on-board battery back up to guarantee data retention. A manufacturing diagnostic utility, such as RAIDDIAG™, is used to check and verify on-board battery logic in a Disk Operating System (DOS) environment. In order to do this, during test time, adapters are mounted on ADEX raiser cards that in turn are mounted on add-on PCI-PCIX slots in host machine. RAIDDIAG™ writes down known data patterns on adapter memory that is backed up with battery logic. Subsequently, RAIDDIAG™ switches off the power supply to the adapter. After a delay, RAIDDIAG™ switches the power supply back on to the adapter. Data integrity is verified to determine whether battery logic is functioning. Power cycling to the adapter through the raiser card is via an IO port of the host machine.
When power is removed from the adapter and then reapplied, the host operating system (e.g., DOS) has no knowledge about the power removal event. Configuration registers of RAID PCI adapters are reset and un-initialized. In order to bring the adapter out of this reset state, configuration registers need to be reinitialized. This is done by a host based diagnostic program RAIDDIAG™. The value of each register is system topology specific and varies from motherboard to motherboard design. Traditionally, a software programmer used to hardcode these values in the diagnostic program. This necessitated different versions of the diagnostic program for every combination of motherboard design and adapter topology.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a single diagnostic program that is able to verify the functionality of RAID and other kinds of host bus adapters in which the motherboards have different adapter topologies.